1-255 KILIAN & KEELEY EXCEL ON ILLINOIS INTERSTATE COMPLETE CLOSURE BY SARAH REDOHL
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Interstate 255 was among the first Rebuild Illinois projects. It was completed in October 2020. In June 2019, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed into law the state’s first capital plan in nearly a decade - and the largest in state history. The historic, bipartisan bill, Rebuild Illinois, aims to make $45 billion worth of investments in roads, bridges, railroads, state facilities and more by 2025. A $67 million project on Interstate 255 was among the first Rebuild Illinois projects. The Kilian Corporation, Mascoutah, Illinois, and its partner on the joint venture, Keeley & Sons, East St. Louis, Illinois, bid the job in November 2019 and completed it Oct. 28, 2020. I-255 is a six-lane interstate that loops around the St. Louis Metro East area on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. The concrete road had badly deteriorated over the years. “There were a tremendous amount of potholes everywhere,” said Steve Williams, operations manager at Kilian. This particular section of I-255 has an average annual daily traffic of 50,000. “There’s a tremendous amount of truck traffic on this portion of the interstate, because there are quite a few quarries along the Mississippi River,” Williams said, adding that there are four quarries
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within 10 miles of the project. There’s also a lot of north-south truck traffic that uses I-255 to avoid traveling through downtown St. Louis. “St. Louis isn’t very conducive to truck traffic, and this is a major route to sidestep that.” Because the road experiences such heavy use, closing any lanes for construction was likely to create major problems. The complete closure enabled cheaper, faster and safer construction, reducing the completion time from 4 years to 10 months while saving $14 million and increasing safety both for workers and drivers. Although Kilian wasn’t involved in the decision to close 255 during construction, Williams said it was a smart move. “If IDOT elected to do periodic lane closures, the traffic snarls would have been so bad that our trucks wouldn’t be able to get to us,” Williams said. And, he added, Kilian’s crews prefer the complete closure to what would have been the most likely alternative of completing the job at night. “So much work in the Metro-East area these days is happening at night, and it really begins to wear out families and affects the ability to retain employees.”
